Sumner Redstone of Viacom/Paramount Pictures announced yesterday that they are ending their 14-year relationship with Tom Cruise because, well, Tom’s a raging lunatic and it’s embarrassing.

As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal,” Redstone was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal report e-mailed to reporters. “His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.”

As expected, Cruise’s handlers threw a bunch of lies at the wall hoping at least some will stick. Tom Cruise’s producing partner, Paula Wagner, said:

Whatever remarks Mr. Redstone would make about Tom Cruise personally or as an actor have no bearing on what this business issue is. I don’t understand why this would be turned into a personal attack. Because that’s what it is. That’s letting one of your greatest assets walk out the door. It looks like bad business to me. There must be another agenda that the studio has in mind to take one of their greatest assets and malign him this way. We in fact made a decision not to continue our relationship with Paramount Pictures,” Paula claims that they decided to produce independently and they quit and weren’t fired. “For some reason, Paramount has chosen to negotiate in the press. It’s not really the most businesslike approach. We’ve had virtually no dealings with Mr. Redstone.”

Right, sure. “I quit, you didn’t fire me!” “I broke up with you, you didn’t break up with me!” “I’m not crazy, you are!” 99.5% of Hollywood is crazy, including the people on both sides of this latest bit of drama. Hopefully they’ll all meet at the playground after school and fight over who’s the winner here. But instead of a traditional fist fight, they’ll see who can drool the most while crossing their eyes and impersonating a monkey. It’ll be a fight to the death, I tell ya. And Tom Cruise will win. If it’s possible to drool to death, Tom Cruise will find a way. He’s already tricked millions of people into thinking he’s a good actor and that’s pretty damn amazing.